Q&A: Ramachandra Guha on the State of Democracy

Ramachandra Guha, a prolific and eloquent chronicler of Indian history and the current state of the world’s largest democracy, recently launched a new book: “Patriots & Partisans.”

It is aimed at a broader audience than some of Mr. Guha’s previous, more academic works. It takes on, broadside, what he perceives to be the ills of today’s left, right and Congress parties. A series of eclectic essays, the book also tackles the decline in the reputation of Jawaharlal Nehru as well as the hate mail that the author has received over the years from angry Hindus.

Mr. Guha, who lives in Bangalore, spoke with India Real Time about today’s politics and the launch of Arvind Kejriwal’s new party. This is an edited transcript.

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WSJ: If you look at the state of democracy today you could say there have been a lot of corruption scandals that are coming to light. Why is this the time to write a book that in some ways excoriates the state of Indian democracy?

Mr. Guha: I don’t excoriate the state of India’s democracy, I excoriate the state of India’s political parties and I think that is a very important distinction to make.

This is a book for a general audience but if I were to express it in a more conceptual, academic way I would say that democracy is a stool with three legs. One leg is the government and the party system, the constitutional democracy; second is the private sector because in a poor country like India unless you generate wealth you can’t really sustain a democracy. The third leg is civil society, which includes the media.

WSJ: What are you seeing today versus the 1950s and 1960s?

Mr. Guha: If you apply this three-legged-stool model to the 1950s, the most robust leg was the government and the political parties and the least robust was civil society, which was non-existent.

Today, civil society is more vigorous, the press is more vigorous, the private sector is more daring but public institutions are inefficient and corrupt and political parties are either sectarian or the property of families. This book is certainly downbeat about the state of our political parties and the state of governance in India. But other institutions are functioning. Our sense of national unity is quite strong.

WSJ: Who do you admire in Indian politics today?

Mr. Guha: There are at least two or three chief ministers that are quite good. One of them is Nitish Kumar of Bihar, who is not sectarian, who is not corrupt and who is not a megalomaniac. He’s focused on law and order and governance. He has his faults – he’s intolerant of criticism by the press. I’m not saying he is perfect but he’s one of our better chief ministers.

The other is a man who is never discussed because the northeast is outside the purview of the Indian media and the foreign media: Manik Sarkar of Tripura, whose wife is a schoolteacher, who leads a transparent life. In a state riven by ethnic discord between tribals and Bengalis, he has restored peace. Unlike the standard orthodox Left, which is anti-computerization and Luddite, he has embraced new technology and is a great champion of the Unique Identification Number scheme, for example. What India needs is 10 or 12 chief ministers of the quality of Nitish Kumar and Manik Sarkar. There also are some fine people in the BJP.

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Arvind Kejriwal at a rally in New Delhi, Nov. 26.

WSJ: What is your take on Arvind Kejriwal, can he make a difference?

Mr. Guha: I don’t think he can make a difference politically. I think it’s good what he and his group have done to highlight misconduct by people of different parties. But forming a political party is probably a mistake because he doesn’t have an organizational backbone, he does not have different branches in parts of the country.

I doubt he can win more than five or six seats in any national election. Even five is probably optimistic. The mistake these people made is not to push through legislative reform once they had the government on the back foot last year. They should really have looked for a good anticorruption law, a workable anticorruption law. I think his forming of a political party is probably a strategic mistake.

WSJ: What is your answer then?

Mr. Guha: We have to look for a Congress minus the dynasty, a BJP without being tied to the RSS. We probably need a new political party. There is probably room for it, with a growing middle class of about 100 to 150 million – we don’t know how many — a middle class that is not sectarian, that is not bound by ties of caste or region or religion. But I don’t think it can be done this way, by television campaign. Five years of grassroots work could have been followed by a television campaign.

One of the problems Mr. Kejriwal is going to face now is that television has made him a demigod. If he is going to reach out tomorrow to a party that already exists, you can’t find room for other capable leaders when it is so centered around his personality. There is room for another party but it has to be built bottom up.

WSJ: You mention you think India needs a proper Left that engages in government. There’s also an argument to be made that India needs a free-market, right-wing party.

Mr. Guha: I think we need both. We simply can’t follow the American and Chinese model of one car for everyone and massive highways because where are all the resources going to come from?

India now faces a massive water crisis, drinking water, water for irrigation, water for disposal of waste. And these are questions that only a properly functioning state can address. I think one thing that gung-ho free marketers miss is that India can’t so easily replicate the model of a country like America because the resources simply don’t exist and population densities are far higher. So for all these decisions we need a modern Left.

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A picture of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru from the 1950s.

WSJ: You spend a lot of time on Jawaharlal Nehru in the book and on the downward trajectory of his reputation. How can Nehru get his reputation back?

Mr. Guha: He can’t get his reputation back so long as his genealogical descendants illegitimately claim his mantle. Every time Rahul Gandhi says a stupid thing on television, Nehru’s historical reputation takes a further rap.

It’s hard for people to understand that he played a crucial role in nurturing a sense of national unity, in laying the foundations of a multi-party democracy, in assuring equal rights to minorities. At the same time he was unnecessarily suspicious of entrepreneurs and he didn’t really talk about primary education as a solution to inequality. But a judicious, balanced impression of Nehru is impossible so long as his family controls the Congress party.

WSJ: You could be accused of romanticizing the India of the 50s and 60s. Why are you so obsessed with how things were then?

Mr. Guha: I’m not romanticizing the license-permit-quota Raj of the 1950s. I’m not romanticizing the supine and deferential media of the 1950s. I’m not romanticizing the timid, risk-averse entrepreneurial class of the 1950s and 1960s. What I’m saying is that in a country as diverse and complex as India, pluralism and democracy are hard won and easily lost. We have to be continually vigilant; we cannot take them for granted.

Also, what was better about the 1950s and 1960s, what I do romanticize about, is the quality of our public officials, at least in terms of their personal honesty and their lack of abuse of the positions they controlled. That we’ve lost. If you compare the MPs of today, and the MPs of the 1950s and 60s, they took the train, they didn’t amass ill-gotten wealth, they were completely transparent and honest. Likewise the public officials, the judges and civil servants.

Paul Beckett is the WSJ’s South Asia bureau chief. Follow him on Twitter @paulwsj. Follow India Real Time on Twitter @indiarealtime.

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